


waltz-adjacent

by petalprose



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale's Bookshop (Good Omens), Banter, Dancing, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gen, M/M, Other, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Waltzing, or attempts at it, their relationship is ambiguous here. they could be pining or established relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21939223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petalprose/pseuds/petalprose
Summary: It has been said that angels and demons don't dance, but that doesn't entirely rule out the possibility that they may learn to.For a certain angel and demon pair, getting to the learning part of learning to waltz comes with no small amount of trial and error and unnecessary twirls.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: Aspec-friendly Good Omens





	waltz-adjacent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashfen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashfen/gifts).



Aziraphale and Crowley: do not dance. Not as a rule, or anything that encompasses the general gist of the specifics of what they are (they’re on their own side, what’s the limitations of angel- or demon-hood got to do with them?); it would be more accurate, actually, to say that they both danced, but neither had made a habit of or time for it in recent years. That is to say, they had both gotten rather rusty, as a result.

So really, Aziraphale’s suggestion that they learn to waltz together with nothing but “the YouTube” (Crowley _knows_ Aziraphale knows what he’s doing saying that) as guidance should have been marked as fated to failure from the very beginning. At the very least, the stepping on each other’s feet would be inevitable, as would the tripping. Normally, the belief that they would not fall victim to such a human mistake would be enough to keep them from doing so, but both of them couldn’t fool themselves on this.

Aziraphale was faring much better than expected, Crowley thought, slowly stepping to the side as Aziraphale followed suit. The serene look on Aziraphale’s face was only betrayed by the unsteady hold he had on Crowley, which was, actually, a pretty telling betrayal, considering Crowley could ignore Aziraphale’s face but not his body when it was quite literally embracing him. Crowley had his sunglasses off, but it wasn’t like Aziraphale himself could tell Crowley was overthinking and internal monologuing and generally being a bit of a pretentious and panicky twit in the privacy of his racing thoughts. Crowley wouldn’t have taken the glasses off otherwise. As it is, he’d only taken them off because earlier he’d joked about breaking them if he tripped, then got legitimately concerned about the possibility and placed them onto the table hosting his phone. Aziraphale took offense (“you know I can catch you, Crowley,”) at this, but let it be.

Abruptly, the music stuttered. Aziraphale’s steps faltered.

“That’s the spirit!” said the dance instructor lady, irritatingly, from Crowley’s iPhone. She was far too upbeat for the hour, never mind that it wasn’t either too late or too early. The music continued, and both angel’s and demon’s attention shifted to their digital dance teacher for the afternoon. Wait. Evening, actually. It had gotten darker outside; must be dusk, by now. “Now, once you’ve gotten that step down and memorized, you’ll want to move onto more complicated moves…”

Her partner returned on screen. Crowley and Aziraphale had stopped, but not stopped holding each other, which Crowley very much took notice of, and tried very much to pretend like he hadn’t taken notice. It was all tickety-boo. He waltzed with his best friend all the time, yeah. “I’ll be the lead,” said the partner, which Crowley only half-processed, and he smiled down at the woman, which Crowley only noticed because Aziraphale’s hold had gotten steady and he’d snapped to attention with a start.

They arranged themselves; Crowley had begun to slouch a bit, and he corrected his posture. The pair on screen had already started to demonstrate the Exciting New Dance Steps, so Crowley paused and rewound the video with an absent tap of his finger against Aziraphale’s hand.

“How’re you holding up, angel?” They’d been bantering at the beginning of this, chasing off the awkwardness by poking some harmless fun at the other’s mistakes. Gradually, as they both took the endeavor more seriously, the conversation had tapered off into silence. Crowley raised a brow as if his question needed any more emphasizing.

Now, as was earlier mentioned, Aziraphale was faring much better than Crowley as far as dancing went. However, despite what Crowley may think, Aziraphale was in fact also the better one between them both when it came to keeping his nervous energy down—Crowley had been alternating between focusing very hard at his feet as if daring them to stumble and visibly relaxing each and every one of his facial muscles. It was not very inconspicuous. Not a lot of things about the demon were inconspicuous, actually, but the clammy palm and too-purposeful steps really stole the show.

In addition, Crowley was not blinking at all. He had not blinked _once_ since he’d taken off his glasses, and Aziraphale had it on good authority (his authority, but then he’d been friends with Crowley for centuries, hadn’t he) that Crowley blinked at a slower-than-average-rate, but the point was that the demon _blinked._

Any number of reasons could be the cause for his constant gaze. Aziraphale, focused as he was on making sure they did not take an impromptu course on friendship with the floor, didn’t linger on any of them. But the thought was there, of course.

“Well,” said Aziraphale, immediately and in direct contrast to the internal monologue he’d slogged through in the heartbeat before he replied, “Certainly better than you’ve been, I imagine.”

Crowley took offense. “Yeah?” And then, in what Aziraphale will think later on was a flagrant indicator that he was right, “Bet you I could do better if we just freestyled this.”

“Essentially every move you’ve made since we began this lesson had some element of _freestyling_ in it,” said Aziraphale, drily, which was fair enough. Crowley had tried, for the first few minutes, to put a spin to every suggestion the instructor made. Sometimes literally. It was both awfully endearing and awfully distracting and, well, distractingly and endearingly awful. Aziraphale had watched with no small amount of glee when, at one point, Crowley had attempted an elaborate, exaggerated twirl and proceeded to step on his own foot.

(This was actually what drove Crowley to remove his sunglasses.)

Crowley shrugged, and the movement served to dislodge the hand Aziraphale had on his shoulder. He snapped his fingers and a swell of music came from his phone, significantly different that what had been playing in the tutorial video. For one thing, it wasn’t something one could waltz to.

Aziraphale brought this up as Crowley took his hands, but anything else he might have had to say became forgotten as Crowley stepped backwards and pulled him into a spin. It seemed for all that the music was entirely inappropriate for the dance they were trying to learn, Crowley was determined to make it work.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale said, shocked, still caught in the spin—they were on to their second one now, goodness—“Have you the slightest clue what you’re doing?”

“None at all,” said Crowley, with great relish. He was very clearly proud of himself at having successfully pulled Aziraphale along. “Not a single in sight, either.”

At the end of the third spin ‘round, he managed to maneuver Aziraphale into turning, his chest to Aziraphale’s back.

“You want to dip me, don’t you,” said Aziraphale, already resigned.

“You’re quick to catch on.”

Aziraphale obliged. Crowley dipped him. They stared at each other.

“I don’t suppose you’d be cross with me if I pretended to drop you?”

“I don’t suppose you’d mind if you suddenly found yourself bereft of your visiting privileges?”

Crowley gave a short laugh at that. “Visiting privileges,” he parroted, pulling Aziraphale back up. There was a note of something sarcastic in there that Aziraphale made the executive decision to ignore.

“Yes, visiting privileges,” said Aziraphale, watching bemusedly as Crowley set to work rearranging them to his liking. “Seeing as you don’t actually live here.”

“Oh, of course. Sure.” Seemingly satisfied, Crowley had the music change again, into something slower. Still not quite right for a waltz, though Aziraphale figured it would be easier to fit a waltz into this song than the previous one. He believed that song had been from that pop band… fall out boys, was it? In any case, Aziraphale couldn’t easily recognize the song that was now playing.

Crowley had already begun dancing; it was a horribly improvised box waltz that was more walk than dance. Aziraphale followed without realizing it, placing his feet according to Crowley’s steps automatically. How he managed was beyond him. Crowley looked him in the eyes and winked and Aziraphale sighed, twirled Crowley entirely out of time with the music.

It was nice, that Crowley had eased into this and relaxed; Aziraphale watched the grin on his face grow, unrestrained. Quite worth it, even if they never did manage a proper waltz, in the end. There were always other nights, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> i listened to strawberry blonde at three am in the morning until i couldn’t physically handle it anymore writing this. also halfway through writing this I re-checked your prompt and it said art so it made me panic that I had signed up to an art-centered secret santa without realizing and as of publishing i still have genuinely no idea if I truly managed to fuck up that badly but please have this regardless happy holidays


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